It Takes Two
by Whatclaptrap
Summary: Wandering around with a courier that should, by all rights, have been dead in the ground months ago can get pretty exciting...
1. Chapter 1

Wandering around with a courier that should, by all rights, have been dead in the ground months ago can get pretty exciting. There were the raiders, the legionary assassins, the endless waves of fiends or powder gangers or whoever the boss lady pissed off that day, not to mention the occasional swarm of cazadors (they always came in swarms) and, if they were very lucky, deathclaws. But, if Raul were honest, at least she was a better cook than any of the super mutants up on Black Mountain. So between the two jobs, both with a high threat of danger, dismemberment and possible death, he was usually pretty alright with the fact he'd got stuck with the courier.

Usually, anyways.

Today was one of the less good days. His knees had been creaking since they'd woken up, and in trying to sneak past a pair of heavily armed toughs the courier had tripped over a tin can and knocked over a carefully stacked pile of metal crates. Needless to say they'd drawn the attention of the very people they'd been trying to avoid. It had gone relatively quick – they were both good shots, and Rex was always happy to bound past both of them and rip into tasty raider flesh – but Raul had still gotten gouged when one of the raiders ran out of bullets and started working with a knife.

It wasn't a terribly bad cut (which was good, because if the boss lady had to try and sew him up he might just wander into the wastes to die, since that prolonged and agonizing death would be less painful) but it was on his ribs and he felt it with every move. The med-x wasn't helping to dull the pain enough, and Rex had popped a gasket so the boss lady was cursing up a storm, trying to fit it back on while the dog kept wiggling in her grasp. It had been three, maybe four days since any of them had even had a chance to pat down the sweaty spots on their armor and Raul was pretty sure he was wearing a coat of wasteland dust like a second skin. And – _and_ – the dead guys were starting to smell already.

Fortunately, she seemed to realize he wasn't exactly in the best of moods. After fixing Rex – or juryrigging the poor damn dog's leg back into commission – she left him the rest of the mex-X and a couple stimpaks. Then she slipped away, and Raul didn't ask why. She was a big girl. She could take care of herself.

He popped a stimpak and sat for a while, letting his old bones rest. At least, he did, until Rex started to whine. He shushed the dog, but the silence only lasted for ten minutes before Rex started whining again. With a tired groan, Raul stood up. He grabbed his vaquero hat and the spare stimpaks, and Rex scrabbled after him as he went looking for their courier.

He found her not too long after he started looking. When he did he couldn't believe his ears – he thought they'd been playing tricks on him. Music; not the radio, because he hadn't heard this song a million times before. It was different. It was _new_.

He didn't believe it, but there she was, sitting in front of a broken terminal with her Pip-Boy casting greenish light on her face. She was watching something play out on the wrist screen readout, transfixed; Raul already knew what it was, just from the sound.

She glanced up when he came in the room, and she slammed a hand down on her Pip-Boy. The melody streaming from her wrist went silent. "I'm busy, Raul."

He didn't grin, though he wanted to; those had been her first words to him when they'd met – _I'm Bizzy, Raul. _ He didn't get it was her name until she wrote it out later; he wasn't privy to the fact that it was short for Bismuth until she'd been out of her mind on mentats and rambling. She hated it, and he had no idea why anyone would name their kid after a metal, so he usually just called her boss.

"Can I see, boss?" he asked, gesturing to her pip-boy. It was hard to tell in the soft light of her Pip-Boy, but if he were a betting man he'd put money on her blushing. His boss lady didn't blush often.

She hesitated for a moment, a conflicted twist of her lips speaking to her reluctance. After a moment she shrugged, affecting like she didn't care. "Sure. It's just an old holodisk file. I found in the desk in the corner."

She held out her wrist and he stepped over, Rex interposing himself between their legs. She played the video, and Raul watched, transfixed as she'd been a moment earlier.

He didn't recognize the song, but he recognized the beat. It was more than a little familiar, and it made him ache like only remembering the past could. He recognized the video, too; not the people in it or the background, but the steps. It showed a couple, grainy on the Pip-Boy screen, and they stood close together – so close, but with the tight control that truly good dancers displayed. It's a dance he knows, one that he remembers from when he was young enough to dance with pretty girls. Before the bombs dropped.

"It's called the tango," Raul said, watching as the couple move on the screen of her Pip-Boy. They stepped so gracefully, leading and following, push and pull.

"A pre-war dance?" She asked, eyes fixed on the screen. "Was this the sort of thing people did a lot back then?"

"Well, boss, before the bombs fell we didn't have the luxury of spending our days shooting at each other," Raul said. "We had to find other ways of entertaining ourselves."

She gave him a sidelong look, halfway between amused and annoyed. "I don't understand how you managed to keep sane back then. It sounds so _boring._" Her sarcasm was biting and affectionate. Her gaze trailed back over to the screen of her Pip-Boy, and she stares for a moment longer. "Did you ever dance like that?"

"Yeah," Raul said. "I did. I was okay. Not as good as they are, though." The way the figures on the screen are moving, they had to be professionals, and it had to be a choreographed dance. Too many complicated tricks to be done at the drop of a hat.

"Mm," she said. She let the conversation die, and Raul didn't bother forcing it forward. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, until the video ended.

Rex was the one who broke the silence, letting out a whine and shoving his nose in Bizzy's crotch. She yipped, shoving Rex's head away. "Stupid mutt," she grumbled; she scratched the cyberdog's ears anyways. "Lucky I'm not a guy. I'd be a lot more pissed if I had been."

Raul snorted. Bizzy glanced up at him when he did, a question in her eyes. "You okay to keep going, or should we camp here?"

Raul shrugged. It made the cut on his side twinge. "Up to you, boss. You know me, I live to please."

This time it was her that snorted, a grin flashing across her face. Just like that, the video was a thing of the past. There was a part of him, the oldest part, that wanted to watch it again - an old man reaching for a little shred of the past, of a better time. But he didn't mention it, and it wasn't like he was going to get the thing off her Pip-Boy any time soon.

They gathered up their things and they moved on. Looking for some semblance of safety in the wasteland. Like they always did.


	2. Chapter 2

They were in Novac when it came up again.

It had been a long day. Not too many fights, nothing out of the ordinary – for once they'd stayed on the road, no wild excursions to see whatever-the-hell in the distance. Bizzy was tired, though – he could see it in every movement, the way she sagged like she was going to fall over. She'd been popping mentats again, quietly, like she was trying to keep her habit under the table.

It was probably Novac itself. She'd told him about it; it was one of the few places that wiped the grin off her face. The thing with Jeannie May still stuck in her head. She'd been happy to help Boone take revenge for his wife – Bizzy was a revenge kind of person – but something about it always got her down.

Still, Novac was a convenient place to spend the night. She still had the key to the room in the hotel, kept it even after she'd gotten Jeannie May's head blown off. They climbed the stairs, opened the door, and without any preamble his boss lady flopped onto the couch with a groan.

Raul kept Rex from jumping on the bed, then started doing his job. He dug out his guns and broke them down, pulling apart the components, brushing everything off and oiling everything up. 'Course, he had to jury-rig some tools to do the finer bits of cleaning, but that was kind of par for the course by now.

She was out of it enough, staring at the ceiling with her thoughts, that he actually had to implore her to give up her revolvers. He poked her with one of his jury-rigged tools. "C'mon, boss. Unless you got some other two hundred year old ghoul waiting around to fix your equipment, of course. In which case, why haven't I met him and why can't I go back to the Lucky 38?"

"Hush, old man," she said, tugging her revolvers out of their holsters and handing them to him one at a time. "mend my things and make them shine like a deathclaw's eye."

He snorted at her, glad that at least a little bit of her humor was shining through. He let her go back to staring at the ceiling with glassy eyes, and he didn't mention that he could see how huge her pupils had gotten. She was going to have to get that mentat problem fixed sometime.

He finished with the .357 and was working on her .44 when the music started playing again. He took a moment to glance up at her. She'd propped her head up on the arm rest of the couch, the greenish light of her Pip-Boy shining off of her eyes.

She didn't notice him glancing up, which was probably for the best. If she noticed she might have turned it off, and honestly, the change of pace was welcome. He turned back to his maintenance work, wishing, for a moment, that someone out there would find a box of new music and send it to Mr. New Vegas. The guy was an all right radio personality, but a man could only take so much musical repetition.

"Raul, could you teach me?" Her question came as a surprise. Raul twisted to look at her, what was left of his eyebrows drawing together in confusion.

Then he realized, the way her glassy eyes were fixed to the screen on her wrist. "To _dance?_" it came out more incredulous than he meant it to.

"Yeah." Her gaze focused on him.

Raul stared at her for a moment. It wasn't often in his long life that he was at a loss for words, but this came so far out of left field that he had no idea what to say. Sure, she'd asked him to teach her stuff in the past – he was the main reason she knew how to repair any part of a gun at all – but that was something he'd been doing forever. It was like second nature. This was _different_.

"Boss, you have the coordination of a drunken mole rat." It slipped out before he could think better of it. It wasn't entirely true anyways; she could move, when she needed to. She was fast, and she had a steady hand when she was shooting, but she was clumsy as hell the rest of the time. She'd been caught pickpocketing a guy while using a stealth boy. That took a special level of blundering.

Her eyes widened a little and her ears turned pink. "I do not! Shut up, Tejada!" She leaned over to the bed, snagging one of the pillows and tossing it at him. Her toss went wide and thumped Rex, who whined like he'd done something wrong.

"Sorry, boss, I guess me thinking your hand-eye coordination could use some work was _completely_ misguided." Raul said, voice thick with mockery as he eyed the pathetically cowed cyberdog.

Still flushed with embarrassment, his boss lady let out a yip of surprised laughter. She quickly slapped a hand over her mouth, like she was trying to stifle it, and then she clicked her tongue at Rex and snapped her fingers. The cyberdog pulled himself off of the floor and went over, shoving his head under her hands.

"Okay," she said, after a moment. "Fine. You're right." There was something in her voice, and in the way her hands lingered on Rex's body, that spoke of disappointment.

Raul swallowed back a sigh. "I can try and teach you, boss. It won't be that hard, as long as you don't want to be the leader. I'm attached to the toes I have left."

"No comments about how I'm going to ruin your knees?" Her voice was small and vulnerable, even though she was making a joke; she only got like this when she was high.

"Boss, there is nothing in tango that's going to ruin my knees more than carrying your soda pop all over the Mojave already has." He said it specifically because she knew she would give him a look.

And she did, a moment of lucid amusement. Quick as that, the moroseness she'd been displaying was gone. "Sorry that my sunset sarsaparilla weighs so heavily on you. I'd be more sorry if I didn't notice you leaving empty bottles behind. Thief."

He shrugged, keeping his face straight. "I told you I had a sweet tooth."

She snorted, turning her attention back to Rex. She put her hands on either side of the dog's face and smooshed his cheeks. "You don't steal my sunset, do you, Rexxie? You're a good boy! Yes you are!" The dog wagged its tail, oblivious to the stupidity of the praise he was receiving.

Raul didn't quite smile. He turned his attention back to her .44 revolver. "Would you play the song again?"

She quieted. Her Pip-Boy made a couple of beeps, and then the tango song started playing again. She went back to murmuring praise at the dog, and Raul used her moment of distraction to hum along with the music. He'd worry about teaching his boss lady, and all that entailed, later. Plus, who knew. Maybe he'd get lucky and she'd drop it after the mentats wore off.


	3. Chapter 3

Bizzy was strange in a lot of ways. Most of it could be attributed to the whole getting-shot-in-the-head thing. One of the ways that she was strange – nice, but strange – was that she always insisted Raul sleep in the bed. When he did sleep, anyways. Not so weird when they were at the Lucky 38 and there were empty beds galore. A little bit weirder when it was just them in the wasteland. But she always let Rex sleep on the bed too.

The night was completely uninteresting, except that she elbowed him in the face in the middle of a sleep-fight with the pillow. After that he moved to the couch, which he was plenty comfortable with anyhow.

Early in the morning she woke up. They packed up their things and they left Novac and the shadow of that gigantic dinosaur in the dust. Bizzy stopped to talk to No-Bark, and when she wasn't looking Raul bought some fixer from the doctor lady of questionable professionalism. Just in case the mentat withdrawal started to get to be too much.

The boss lady started easing back to her normal self the further they got from Novac. The characteristic grin emerged on her face, and at about noon she grabbed his arm and dragged him off the road because "Raul, did you see it? There was something over there!"

They tromped through an old blown out house and found a couple of Lad's Life magazines stuffed under a dirty mattress. It was nothing special, which, for them, was pretty normal. It also meant that it took a long time for them to make any progress down the road. They ended up setting up camp in a broken down trailer next to a campfire as night fell.

His boss lady cranked out a couple of those meals she cobbled together from desert plants and brahmin steaks as he did some fixing on one of the seams on her duster. She fed bits of left over brahmin to Rex, then, when the dog rolled over and started napping, she fixed her gaze on Raul.

"So, Mr. Tejada, you're going to teach me about dancing."

Raul didn't exactly grimace. He had hoped a little bit that she'd forgotten about the whole damn thing. "Sure, boss, if you really want to."

"I do. But I had some questions, first."

That, at least, was solid ground, and Raul said so. "Don't you always, boss? Shoot."

There was half a grin on her face when she replied. "Now I know it's a shock, Raul, but I don't _actually_ know everything. You said something about 'leading' last night. What did you mean?"

Raul put down her duster, stretching out his legs. One of his knees popped as he did. "There's an old saying about curiosity I should tell you sometime, boss. Seems relevant to your situation. What you need to know about partner dancing, like the video you've got on your Pip-Boy, is that there's a leader and a follower. Classically speaking, the follower part falls to the lady. The leader's the one that's leading the dance, obviously. He figures out what moves to guide the lady into, keeps her from running into other couples on the dance floor, that kind of thing."

"So you'd be teaching me the follower's part?" She asked, clasping her hands together.

"Like I said, I'm kind of attached to my feet." Raul flexed his feet for emphasis. "No offense meant."

"I'm so offended I might burst," Bizzy said, voice flat, though the quirk of her lips was more than enough to say she was amused. "Might have to go on a killing spree. Know of any gang hideouts around here?"

Raul shrugged. "Hey, I'm just along for the ride."

"Yeah, I bet. Well," she said, standing. She dusted off her pants. "how do I start learning to follow?"

Raul stood, moving much slower than she was. He chewed that question over. It was a tough one. She was eager to learn, sure, but that was only part of the equation. It wasn't like they had a dance floor, and uneven dirt and rocks weren't the best surface to learn on. Hell, it had been years since he'd even thought about dancing, much less done it.

Plus there was the little issue where he was the only one around, and she needed a dance partner. Bizzy wasn't most people. She was kind of loca. Nonetheless, smoothskins usually weren't the most enthusiastic about being touched by a ghoul. And if there was one person – well, there were a lot of people that Raul didn't want to piss off in the wasteland, to be honest, but Bizzy wasn't low on that list. He never forgot Boone's story, how she hunted down the guy who'd shot her in the head and grinned like a maniac when she killed him in his own hotel.

He hesitated, then sighed. Better to ask now rather than later. "Hold up, boss. I know you're eager and all, but I have to ask; you realize we're going to be close, right? Real close."

Her brows came together, confusion flashing over her face. "Yeah, so? Raul, are you saying I smell? I'm hurt." She was joking with him, he could tell it from the inflection in her voice. But she didn't understand why he was asking.

Sometimes it was frustrating that his boss could be so oblivious to really, really obvious things. "I know this is scandalous talk and all, and in a couple years you would've realized this on your own, but I feel I wouldn't be doing my duty if I didn't break it to you now; I'm a ghoul. Funny thing about that is that most smoothskins don't like getting friendly with ghouls."

Understanding made her freeze for half a moment. Raul wondered if that meant she was going to drop it; if she'd realized the implications, really thought it through and decided she wasn't okay with that. Sure, she'd made him sleep in a bed next to her, but the beds in Novac were wide. Partner dancing was personal. Tango, it could get even more personal.

She blinked, shook off the momentary pause. She rolled her eyes, a tired sort of smirk twisting her lips. "Well, since you're being so honest with me, Raul, I suppose I should get it out in the open; I'm a ghoul fetishist. Love it. Sleeping with ghouls. All the time. Sometimes multiples—"

"—Okay, boss, I get the point—"

"—and there's ropes, and whips, and I mean, who doesn't like a five-way now and again, last time we had to pay for a broken sex swing at Gomorrah—"

Raul actually grimaced. "Ay, dios mio…"

She burst into laughter. "Seriously, Raul? You were worried about that? I _asked_ you to teach me. Dumbass."

"Puta," he shot back. It made her laugh harder, one of the few words in Spanish that she knew.

"Come on, my foul-mouthed vaquero friend," she said, beckoning him over. "You said you'd teach me how to dance. Are you a man of your word, or not?"

Well, she was the boss.


End file.
